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ASP 101's Year in Review - A Look Back At 2008

As always seems to happen this time of year, I find myself wondering where 2008 went. Our faithful readers will probably recall that my usual reaction to this feeling is to take a few minutes out of the hectic holday season to look back and highlight some of the best content of the year. For me, this always provides a nice walk down memory lane and helps me realize just how much content we publish and how much it helps people. For our users, it's a second chance to catch something interesting that they might have missed the first time around.

So without any further ado... here's ASP 101's year in review for 2008:

• Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express was our tool of choice this year. We've always been fans of the Visual Studio line of products, but the fact that Microsoft has made a top-notch development tool available for free has removed any hesitation we used to have in recommending it, and the 2008 version is the best one yet. Visual Studio features and tips were discussed throughout the year:

  • Support for Cascading Style Sheets in Visual Studio 2008
  • Visual Studio 2008's Multi-Targeting Support
  • Jump To a File in Windows Explorer Directly From Visual Studio
  • Cut or Copy Entire Lines Instantly in Visual Studio
  • Visual Studio Item Templates
  • Spell Check from Within Visual Studio

• We shared a number of tips and tricks this year to make your coding efforts easier and more productive. These included both ASP.NET and general development tips.

  ASP.NET:
  

  • DefaultButton and DefaultFocus Properties
  • Use the Same Event Handler for Multiple Objects
  • Move Settings Out of the Web.config File
  • How to Register a Control for Application-Wide Use

  Miscellaneous:
  

  • Sortable Date Format
  • How To Calculate Age
  • Name Your Development Sites
  • How To List The Tables In A Database

• In terms of actual sample code, the stand-out based on views and user feedback was our Multi-Term Database Search Sample. As we're often known to do, we made it available in both ASP.NET and Classic ASP (yeah... we're still here for you die-hards!) versions.

• On the note that less is usually more, I'll close with a nod to our article that examines creating A No-Frills Text File Editor.

If you missed any of the above and wish you hadn't, we've got a few different options for you. The first is our weekly e-mail list: The ASP 101 News Flash. If you're more of an RSS junkie than an e-mail jockey, you can always point your feed-reader of choice at the ASP 101 RSS Feed.